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Starting an ISP doesn't have to be that hard at all. If you want to start one in the country where I live you could do so with very little investment. All the
by Aaargh20318 9y ago
Starting an ISP doesn't have to be that hard at all. If you want to start one in the country where I live you could do so with very little investment.
All the issues he talks about are due to the fact that there is no real competition in the US and no infrastructure to support competition.
The way it works over here is that there is a (commercially owned) open fiber network which can be used by anyone who wants to, and prices are the same for everyone. This network owns the last mile fiber, a PoP in each neighbourhood and a City-PoP linked to the neighbourhood PoP's.
You want to start a small ISP with very little investment ? Just lease everything from one of the bigger players. Bandwidth, IPTV service, etc. can all just be repackaged and resold under your own brand name and you can work on getting a customer base. You could run this from your basement without buying a single piece of hardware.
Want to spend a little more ? Use your own backbone network and uplink to the internet, but lease all the last-mile stuff from one of the bigger ISP. Go ahead. Want to do everything yourself ? You can rent space in the PoP's and install your own equipment, all you'd need from a 3rd party is to lease the last mile dark fiber.
You can pretty much choose anything from just reselling an existing package to doing everything yourself except owning the physical fiber and PoP your equipment is placed in. IIRC the situation on DSL is similar.
My current ISP started out as one of those that pretty much resold existing packages and currently they are on the other end of the spectrum and run their entire network by themselves including spinning off their own TV provider that now sells IPTV services to other small ISP's.
Net result of all this: at my address I can choose between 13 ISP's on fiber alone.
How do you get to a situation like this ? Very simple. Make sure the government only issues permits for the installation of a broadband network if the network to be built is going to be open to everyone.
- supergreg 9y agoWhat is this superb country you live in?
- Aaargh20318 9y agoThe Netherlands. Unfortunately, the fiber network doesn't cover the entire country yet. It was bought by the biggest telco a couple of years back and they pretty much halted expansion. Fortunately, a lot of local initiatives have started up with similar conditions.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y ago> "It was bought by the biggest telco a couple of years back and they pretty much halted expansion." Why did they halt expansion? Would they not make enough profit outside of denser metropolitan areas? Could such a model (whereby the government only allows construction of broadband network for companies that agree to lease out the wires to everyone) while facilitating ISP competition actually stifle deployment of new wire?
- Aaargh20318 9y ago> Why did they halt expansion? Because it's cheaper to upgrade their existing phone network to VDSL than to install new fiber. Basically, they already own a nation-wide copper phone network, the fiber network was a competitor. They bought the competitor and halted expansion so they could squeeze some more money out of their existing copper network. The official PR bullshit is that by upgrading the copper network they can offer high speed internet to more people in a shorter amount of time than by expanding the fiber network. > Would they not make enough profit outside of denser metropolitan areas? The denser metropolitan areas are the main areas where there is no fiber yet. It's the more rural areas that have the best fiber penetration.
- gambiting 9y agoProbably UK? I have a choice of about 10 different ISPs where I live in the UK, and none of them would install anything in my house, they all use the same cable that runs to my house, it's just like changing electricity or gas providers.
- wjnc 9y agoWe can make it a little bit more awesome. Many adressess have both a fiber and coaxial cable coming in. Making it a broad competition between fiber and coax. The (only large) cable supplier is Liberty Global, which has responded by bringing quad play products to the market at a pretty good pricepoint. T-Mobile is in as well with quadplay via fiber, plus a lot of local offerings. Say, 60 euros gets you quad play for the family, with 100Mb+, some free online content and 4GB+ mobile data.